Tuesday, July 6, 2010

Shocking Apartheid Alert in the Toronto Star

If it looks like apartheid and sounds like apartheid, let's march against it. . .

Except . . . I'm not referring to the quest by Queers Against Israeli Apartheid (QuAIA) to hijack Toronto's Pride Parade over the weekend. While QuAIA and its fellow travellers issue righteous (if wrong-headed) denunciations of the Jewish state, Palestinian protestors in Beirut are targeting “apartheid” closer to home.

Some 6,000 Palestinians marched on the Lebanese parliament late last month to protest their discriminatory treatment — not at the hands of Israel, but by Lebanon itself.

As Lebanese columnist Rami G. Khouri noted last week, the treatment of these Palestinians — like “penned-in animals” — must be condemned as a “lingering moral black mark.” Writing in the Daily Star of Beirut, Khouri argued that “Lebanon faces a moment akin to . . . when South Africans seriously mooted changing their apartheid system in the 1980s.”